Paul's Down-Home Page

Last night, we marked the one-week anniversary of our move-in by having our first homecooked meal in the new house. That was courtesy of our new stove, which finally arrived yesterday morning. Roast, rice and gravy, corn, and French bread– good stuff.
Almost everything is unpacked. My office area now has electricity, thanks to the efforts of my dad and brother. The radon mitigation system is installed, all of the phone jacks work, there’s wireless upstairs, and the kitchen is mostly functional. We ordered the new countertops; David’s had his first soccer practice, and we’ve met most of our nearby neighbors.
The only major fly in the ointment is the roof. It leaks, which we knew. It doesn’t have any felt under the shingles, though, which we didn’t know. Somehow the seller kinda forgot to tell us. The lack of felt isn’t causing the leaks, but if felt were present it would be helping to stop them. In Perrysburg, if you don’t have felt under the shingles, your roof doesn’t meet the building code. We’re pursuing our options with the seller to find out whether we can get him to pay, or whether we’ll have to (yuck) get a lawyer.

It’s been a busy, busy week. The trucks are unloaded; we’ve been to our first official church meetings as members of the Perrysburg ward, and our house is slowly but surely taking on the character of a home. Today I’m trying to catch up on email and blog entries (I’ll backdate them, so be sure to look over the last few days of August). I’ve also promised to hang a new shower door in the master bath, and Tim and I are going to install some upstairs ceiling fans in the bedrooms. Tomorrow, it’s back to my normal writing schedule.

I was going to write a (hopefully) funny post about how Arlene & I celebrated the day yesterday, but I’m too tired. We spent all day Friday packing and loading trailer #1, with much help from friends from church. We got about 2/3 of the trailer loaded that first day, including the refrigerator, the piano, Arlene’s heavy credenza and china cabinet, the sofa, and my Monster Steel Desk ™. We ended up rejiggering a bunch of the load on Saturday, with yet more help from church friends (including some of the same folks who came and sweated with us on Friday).
Now, the trucks are both loaded, and we close tomorrow on this house. This afternoon I met Chris and Lisa, the buyers, at our house to do a quick walkthrough and to let them get their cats out of their cat crates. Since it’s going to be their house in 18 hours or so, I didn’t see the harm in letting them do so. They seem like a great family, and their kids are obviously excited about the new house, new neighborhood, etc. We had a nice visit, then Tom & I left to go visit the Crosbys and the Chandlers. By the time we came back here, we were both dead tired. Tom, in fact, was so sleepy he didn’t want anything to eat; he just zonked out in the van on the way back. Now he’s asleep, and I will be shortly.
Tomorrow at 0930 we close, then I have to go to the bank, get a dog leash, get the dog from the kennel, and get up to Ohio. Somewhere in there, I have to meet the ABF drivers at our house so they can ship our stuff, then it’s off to the great white north.

Busy last couple of days. I finished another book chapter; the modem in our TiVo died, and our moving preparations are picking up speed. The big truck will be here tomorrow about noon, and we have several shifts of friends from church coming to help us load and pack.
Arlene and I both have talks to give at church on Sunday, plus I have my regular Sunday-school class to teach. Right after church, she’ll leave to drive up to Perrysburg with David and Matt. Thomas and I will stay here for the closing on Monday, then drive up. Our stuff will leave on Monday and arrive sometime later in the week. Of course, the idiot sellers still haven’t told us which of the inspection defects they’re going to fix, and their realtor isn’t even returning our agent’s phone calls– not a good sign. It would really stink if we had to put our stuff in storage to await our closing date, but we may yet have to.

We close on the sale of our Capstone Lane house in seven days: next Monday, 8/26. Our house now looks like the Box Fairy came to visit; there are full, partially full, and disassembled boxes everywhere. Our friend Andy the painter is coming to repaint two rooms today; I have about a dozen items on my to-do list (including cancelling dentist appointments for next month, calling the satellite TV people, and arranging the final details for our moving trucks.)
Most of the equipment in my workroom is taken apart and packed. In the process, I’ve been doing a Thomspon Deep Clean®, during which I found some Valuable Stuff. I also accidentally shipped a perfectly good replacement disk drive back to Maxtor, instead of sending them the broken one they were supposed to get. Time to add “Call FedEx” to my to-do list.
In the meantime, I am pushing to finish chapters 8 & 9 of my book before we move. Since the truck will arrive on Friday sometime, that gives me a pretty tight deadline. Off to work.